Spirit of the Age: Australia, Islam, and Honest Reckoning

No man can struggle with advantage against the spirit of his age and country, and however powerful a man may be, it is hard for him to make his contemporaries share feelings and ideas which run counter to the general run of their hopes and desires.

Alexis de Tocqueville, Democracy in America

I. Tocqueville’s Warning and an Australian Reckoning

Alexis de Tocqueville was not writing about Australia. He was writing about democracy as a force of nature – its tendency to level, to homogenise, and, when threatened, to turn ugly. But his warning carries particular weight at this moment in Australian political life, when the accumulated tensions of decades of policy, demography, and deferred honesty have finally burst their banks. The spirit of the age is roaring back. It wears the face of ordinary voters – not monsters, not ideologues, but working people in Bankstown and Broome, in Geelong and Goulburn, who feel that something in their country was mishandled and that nobody in authority was willing to say so plainly.

This essay tries to say it plainly. It is written in sympathy with the millions of Muslim men and women who came to Australia in good faith, who built lives here, who love this country with the particular ferocity of those who chose it – not by accident of birth but by deliberate act of will. It is also written in sympathy with the Australians who feel displaced, anxious, and unheard. These two sympathies are not contradictory. They are, in fact, inseparable. The only path forward that honours both communities requires exactly what the political class has been most reluctant to provide: an honest account of what went right, what went wrong, and why.

II. The Human Reality of Muslim Migration

Begin with the human reality, because it is too easily lost in the noise of policy debates and polarised commentary. The overwhelming majority of Muslim migrants who have come to Australia over the past half-century are not abstractions. They are not demographic statistics or security assessments or case studies in multiculturalism. They are individuals – Lebanese families who fled a civil war that swallowed whole generations; Somali mothers who crossed oceans to give their children a future; Afghan men who served as interpreters alongside Australian soldiers and then arrived here with nothing but the language they had learned and the hope that it might be enough; Pakistani engineers and Iranian doctors and Iraqi shopkeepers who chose Australia because Australia, at its best, offers something genuinely rare in the world: a society where the rules apply to everyone, where talent and effort are rewarded regardless of sect or tribe, where you can, in theory at least, become fully Australian without renouncing who you were before.

Many of them have done exactly that. Muslim Australians serve in the Australian Defence Force. They sit on hospital boards, run small businesses, teach in public schools, coach local football teams, and raise children who speak Australian English with the flat, laconic vowels that mark belonging as surely as any citizenship ceremony. They pray on Fridays and watch the footy on Saturdays. They donate to bushfire relief and argue about the cricket and complain about house prices just like everyone else. They are not guests in Australia. They are Australians.

Crucially, it is this community – the Muslim mainstream, the quiet majority – that suffers most when bad policy, failed integration, and the actions of a violent or culturally isolated minority make the whole community a target for suspicion and resentment. Every young Muslim man stopped by police because he fits a profile, every Muslim woman who is spat at on a train because she wears a hijab, every Muslim family who is passed over for a rental property because of a name on the application – these are not abstractions either. They are the collateral damage of policies that promised integration and delivered something far more ambiguous. Moderate, assimilated Muslim Australians have the most to gain from a political environment that names problems honestly and deals with them specifically, rather than one that swings between complacent denial and sweeping condemnation.

III. What the Elites Got Wrong

For decades, the dominant position of Australian elites – in Canberra, in the universities, in the broadsheet press – was that mass immigration was an unqualified success, and that any scepticism about cultural fit, integration, or security was reducible to racism. This position was not entirely wrong. Immigration has been enormously productive for Australia. But it was dangerously incomplete, and its incompleteness did real harm.

The harm was not only to the host community, though the strains on housing, public services, and social cohesion in specific suburbs are real and measurable. The deeper harm was to the migrants themselves, particularly those from communities where the cultural distance from mainstream Australian norms was greatest, and where the infrastructure of genuine integration – language classes, employment pathways, community liaison, civic education – was never adequately provided. Multiculturalism, as it was actually practised in Australia, too often meant the right to maintain parallel cultural institutions rather than the supported process of becoming fully Australian. It offered cultural recognition without the harder gift of belonging.

What emerged in some communities was not integration but stratification: second-generation young men caught between a culture that made full Australian belonging conditional and a heritage culture that offered identity but not always opportunity. The sociological literature on radicalisation is clear on this point. It is not usually poverty alone, or religiosity alone, that produces violence. It is the specific combination of marginalisation, identity crisis, and the availability of an ideological framework – in this case, a literalist or jihadist reading of Islam – that promises dignity through confrontation. This is not Islam’s fault. It is, at least in part, a policy failure. Other ideologies – neo-Nazi, incel, eco-terrorism – exploit the same psychological vulnerabilities through different doctrinal channels. But the specific doctrinal content matters, because it shapes the particular forms that violence takes and the communities in which radicalisation is most likely to occur.

The refusal of the political class to name this dynamic clearly was not compassionate. It was cowardly, and it served nobody. It did not protect Muslim communities from the backlash that has now arrived. It did not prevent the attacks, the riots, the eruptions of antisemitism. It merely deferred the reckoning and ensured that when it arrived, it would be angrier and less susceptible to nuance than it might otherwise have been.

IV. The Evidence We Cannot Ignore

Honesty requires facing the evidence directly. From the Cronulla Riots of 2005 – where years of localised tension between young Lebanese-Australian men and beachside communities exploded into racialised violence – to the gang networks operating in Western Sydney and Melbourne, to the post-October 7 explosion of open antisemitism on Australian streets, to the IS-inspired attack at Bondi Beach during Hanukkah in December 2025 that killed at least fifteen people: these are not inventions of a hostile press or projections of nativist anxiety. They are documented events.

Survey data compounds the picture. Polls consistently show sizeable minorities within Australian Muslim communities holding views at odds with core liberal-democratic norms: support for the application of sharia law over secular Australian law in personal and sometimes criminal matters; justification for violence in response to blasphemy against Islam or in defence of what is framed as Muslim honour; ambivalence about full gender equality; hostility to LGBTQ+ rights that goes well beyond mere religious disagreement into advocacy for social exclusion or worse. These views are not held by a majority of Australian Muslims – that point deserves strong emphasis. But they are held by a minority that is not trivial in size, and they are in direct tension with the constitutional framework and the egalitarian social compact that Australia has built over a century.

Around one in three Australians now holds negative views of Muslims, with unfavourable sentiment towards Islam itself running higher still. These numbers reflect something real. They are not simply the product of media demonisation or inherited prejudice, though those forces exist and should not be minimised. They reflect lived experience – the experience of communities that have absorbed the costs of policy failures and have felt, correctly, that those costs were not acknowledged.

None of this justifies collective punishment, ethnic profiling, or the casual cruelty of treating every Muslim Australian as a potential threat. But acknowledging the evidence is the prerequisite for any serious response to it. A politics that refuses to name the problem cannot solve it.

V. The Rise of the Hard Right and What It Tells Us

The political consequences are unfolding in plain sight. One Nation, under Pauline Hanson’s relentless populism, has doubled its Senate representation and is polling above twenty percent in some surveys. Coalition figures have shifted markedly rightward on immigration caps and vetting from what security agencies identify as high-risk jurisdictions. Anti-mass-migration rallies have drawn thousands across Melbourne, Perth, and regional Australia. The political energy is unmistakable.

It would be easy, and lazy, to dismiss this as bigotry in electoral clothing. Some of it is. The hard right contains genuine racists, people whose objections to Muslim migration are not policy objections but ethnic ones – people who would find another target if Muslims disappeared tomorrow. That element should be named for what it is and opposed without apology.

But the much larger share of the surge represents something more legitimate: a democratic correction to a policy trajectory that was imposed without consent and defended without honesty. The voters driving One Nation’s rise are not, in the main, people who hate their Muslim neighbours. They are people who want the rules enforced – who want criminal visa holders deported, who want genuine assimilation rather than subsidised separatism, who want immigration settings calibrated to the actual absorptive capacity of suburbs, hospitals, and schools. These are not unreasonable demands. They are, in fact, the demands that a serious centre-left politics would have anticipated and addressed before the hard right had the chance to monopolise them.

The failure to do so is the real political scandal of the past thirty years. It is a scandal that belongs equally to Labor and the Coalition, to the broadsheet press and the ABC, to university faculties and to think tanks. The progressive reflex to treat any concern about immigration as proto-fascism ensured that the concerns were never processed by mainstream institutions. They metastasised instead, finding expression in movements that mix legitimate grievance with genuine bigotry in proportions that are now very difficult to separate.

VI. What Honest Policy Actually Looks Like

The political response to this moment must be grounded in clarity about what the problem actually is, and what it is not. The problem is not Islam per se. Islam is a vast, internally diverse civilisation with a philosophical and artistic heritage that rivals any in human history – from the algebra of al-Khwarizmi to the poetry of Hafez, from the jurisprudence of Ibn Rushd to the architecture of Isfahan, from Rumi’s Masnavi to the democratic stirrings that have repeatedly, if often unsuccessfully, pushed against authoritarian governance across the Muslim world. The problem is not the faith but specific doctrinal interpretations of it, specific cultural practices attached to some but not all expressions of it, and specific policy failures that allowed those practices to entrench themselves in Australian communities without the friction of genuine integration.

Honest policy would begin with rigorous vetting – not ethnic or religious profiling, which is both unjust and operationally useless, but granular assessment of the values and practices of individual applicants, with particular attention to records of political violence, advocacy for theocratic governance, or demonstrated hostility to the rights of women and minorities. Such vetting is neither unprecedented nor uniquely targeted at Muslims; it reflects the kind of civic assessment that any serious immigration programme would apply to applicants from communities, of any background, where certain patterns have been documented.

It would continue with a genuine integration programme – not the hollow multiculturalism of cultural festivals and translated government forms, but the sustained, funded, demanding process of becoming Australian: language acquisition, civics education, employment pathway support, and clear articulation of the non-negotiable norms on which Australian society rests. These norms include the rule of secular law over religious law in all public matters; the equal legal status of women; freedom of conscience and religion, including the right to leave one’s faith without social penalty; and the rights of LGBTQ+ Australians to live freely and safely. These are not Western impositions on an alien culture. They are the hard-won achievements of a democracy, and they apply to everyone.

Honest policy would also require, finally, a willingness to enforce those norms with the same consistency and rigour that is applied to every other community. The special exemptions and cultural sensitivities that have allowed honour-based violence, forced marriage, and female genital mutilation to persist at the margins of some Australian Muslim communities are not respect for cultural difference. They are the abdication of the responsibility that a liberal state owes to its most vulnerable members – who are, in these cases, overwhelmingly Muslim women and girls. Protecting them is not Islamophobia. It is the most basic expression of the values that Australia claims to hold.

VII. The Moderate Muslim Majority and the Path Forward

The moderate Muslim majority – the people who came to Australia to escape the very intolerance that now tests Australian tolerance – has a crucial role to play in this reckoning. Not as spokespersons for a faith they are constantly asked to explain and apologise for, but as full citizens with the authority to name what they see in their own communities and to demand better from institutions that have too often failed them.

There are Muslim Australians who have been doing this work for years, at considerable personal cost. Scholars and community leaders who have argued against literalist interpretations of Islam, who have advocated for the rights of Muslim women within their own communities, who have cooperated with law enforcement while demanding that law enforcement treat their communities with the same presumption of innocence it extends to everyone else. These voices deserve amplification and institutional support, not the marginalisation they have often received from a progressive establishment that preferred to engage with community leaders who reflected its own assumptions back at it.

The path forward is neither the complacent multiculturalism that pretended the problems did not exist, nor the identitarian backlash that treats all Muslims as a security threat. It is the demanding, unglamorous, absolutely necessary work of integration: of insisting that Australian values apply to everyone, of providing genuine support for that process, of distinguishing carefully between the individuals who are part of Australian society and the specific practices and ideologies that are not compatible with it, and of having the intellectual honesty to make those distinctions in public without flinching.

VIII. The Larrikin Nation and Its Better Angels

Tocqueville believed that the great test of democracy was whether it could resist the tyranny of the majority – whether the spirit of the age could be disciplined by institutions, by law, by the cultivation of deliberate civic virtues. Australia has those institutions. It has a robust legal system, a strong tradition of egalitarianism, a genuinely multicultural society that has managed, over most of its recent history, to absorb diversity with more success than many comparable nations. It has, in the laconic generosity of the larrikin spirit at its best, a genuine openness to the stranger who plays by the rules and gives the place a fair crack.

That spirit is under pressure right now. The pressure comes from real grievances that deserve real answers. But it also comes from political actors – on the right – who benefit from keeping those grievances inflamed rather than resolved, who prefer the politics of resentment to the harder politics of governance. Honest policy, grounded in both justice and reality, is the only answer to both.

The Muslim Australians who came here seeking exactly what Australia offers – safety, fairness, the chance to build something – are not the enemy of that answer. They are, if the politics can be got right, among its most powerful advocates. They know, better than most, what it costs when intolerance wins. They chose Australia, at least in part, because they believed it was capable of doing better. The question now is whether it will.

Tocqueville was right that no man can struggle with advantage against the spirit of his age. But the spirit of an age is not fixed. It is made by people – by the quality of their arguments, by the courage of their honesty, by the willingness of their institutions to act on the evidence rather than the convenience. Australia has the ingredients for a genuinely honest reckoning with what has gone wrong and what must change. Whether it has the political will to use them is the question this moment demands we answer.